Best Shopify Training Courses To Level Up Your Ecommerce Business

Bill Widmer

How would you like to invest $1 and get $1,000 back? How about $1,000,000?

“No way that’s possible!” I hear you saying. “No investment yields those returns.”

But that’s where you’re wrong. There’s one investment that does yield a one thousand percent or even one million percent ROI…

Investing in yourself.

You are your biggest asset, and your business will directly benefit from an improved you. That’s why in today’s guide, I share the seven best free and paid Shopify training courses on the market. Let’s check ‘em out!

Note: All the courses on this list were taken by a Sumo employee or a friend of a Sumo employee, and it’s based on their experiences.

It’s no surprise that Shopify itself is at the top of this list, as they know their product best. Shopify Academy is a free series of Shopify training courses for the complete beginner. It covers everything from setting up your first Shopify store to marketing, product photography, and more.

Each course has a series of 5-8 modules, and each module has a mix of short 1-10 minute videos, text chapters, and extra resources like blog posts.

The courses include:

Getting Started with Shopify with Samantha Renée

This course is for people who have never used Shopify before, or have tried but haven’t gotten the hang of it.

The instructor, Samantha Renée, is an ecommerce guru at Shopify and the co-founder of Weave Got It Canada, a luxury hair extension shop. Samantha used her ecommerce prowess to build the retail store to multiple six-figures per year.[*]

Getting Started with Shopify has six modules:

Understanding Shopify

Signup and Get Started

Store Design 101

Launch Your First Product

Online Customer Service

Get Your Launch Checklist

Turn Your Hobby into a Business with The Kular Family

Like the Getting Started course, this teaches you how to find your product and launch your store with a purpose. I recommend taking both courses before you launch your site, to get a fuller picture of how to start and run your store.

The instructors, the Kular family, founded Jaswant’s Kitchen, an authentic Indian cooking blog that transformed into a retailer of Indian spices and cooking kits.[*]

The modules include:

Profit with Your Product

Brand and Design Your Shopify Store

Shipping Products on a Budget

Marketing Your Business

Launch Your Store!

Dropshipping 101 with Corey Ferreira

If holding inventory in your basement, garage, or a warehouse doesn’t sound like something you want to do, dropshipping is a dream come true.

With dropshipping, you can make sales and your suppliers (or Amazon if you’re using Fulfillment by Amazon) ship the product straight to your customers.

Build a Print-on-Demand Empire with Adrian Morrison

Adrian Morrison is the founder of eCom Success Academy (also on this list) and the founder of several seven-figure ecommerce businesses.

Adrian’s course has five modules:

What is Print on Demand?

Create Your Flagship Print on Demand Products

Create Your Shopify Store

Generating Traffic and Sales

Grow Your Print-on-Demand Empire

Grow Your Business with Instagram with Gretta van Riel

Instagram is a booming market for ecommerce, with over one billion monthly active users, and that number is only going up.[*]

Gretta van Riel is an incredible entrepreneur who founded four multimillion dollar ecommerce businesses in the past six years, including SkinnyMe Tea, the 5th, and Dropbottle. She’s also the founder of Hey!, an influencer marketing platform that connects brands with influencers.

Gretta’s modules are:

How to Build An Engaged Following on Instagram

How to Create Content that Converts Followers to Customers

How to Create an Instagram Sales Funnel

How to Make more Sales with Influencer Marketing

Product Photography for Ecommerce with Jeff Delacruz

The final free training is all about product photography. Whether you dropship or stock your products, your product images can make or break your company.

You’ll learn this skill from Jeff Delacruz, co-founder of Products on White Photography, an agency that will take your product photos on white backgrounds. Jeff and his team have taken over 50,000 photos for 1,800+ businesses.

Jeff’s course contains five modules:

The Value of Perception

Being Strategic about Photography

New Business Owner on a Budget

Business Owner with a Marketing Budget

Increase Sales with Effective Photo Placements

In addition to these free courses, you get free access to live webinar trainings (like a Black Friday/Cyber Monday prep guide) as well as business frameworks and templates, including:

An SEO Checklist

Blog Post Templates

Social Media Strategy Template

Break-Even Analysis

Cash Flow Projection

Long story short, if you’re new to Shopify and want to learn as much as you can without investing any money, start with Shopify Academy.

If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up properly on your Shopify store, you need to get on top of that. Analytics help you understand if your marketing funnel is working, improve your underperforming pages, maximize your ad spend, and so much more.

The course is taught by Adam Reed, a six-figure store owner who’s made over half a million dollars in Shopify sales.

You’ll learn step-by-step how to properly set up Google Analytics with your Shopify account, as well as how to navigate the software and set up funnels.

The lessons include:

Introduction to Ecommerce

Introduction to Google Analytics

Signing Up to Google Analytics

Linking Google Analytics to Shopify

Enhanced Ecommerce

Best Practice: Exclude Your IP Address

Property Navigation

Real Time Reporting

Audience Reports

Acquisition Breakdown

Traffic Behaviour

Ecommerce Conversions

Creating a Goal Funnel

Custom Reports You Need to Use

Setting up Hourly Traffic and Conversion Reports

Setting up Day of the Week Traffic and Conversion Reports

Setting up Hour and Day Conversion Rate Report

Setting up Day of the Month Conversion Rate Report

How to Use Funnel Visualization

Nailing Down Your Target Demographic

Be Where Your Audience Hangs Out

Finding Key Audience Interests

Using Geo Location to Your Advantage

Do You Need More Languages?

How to Apply Analytics Data to Facebook Ads

How to Apply Analytics Data to Google AdWords

Proof this Works: My Facebook Ads Revenue

Proof this Works: My Google AdWords Revenue

Proof this Works: My Google AdWords Retargeting Revenue

This course is for anyone who wants a better understanding of Google Analytics and conversion funnels.

Ecom Success Academy is one of the most in-depth Shopify training courses you’ll find online. It’s taught by Adrian Morrison — the same Adrian who teaches about print-on-demand products in Shopify Academy.

Adrian has built several seven-figure online stores and even one at eight figures. If there’s an example of an ecommerce mogul, he’s it.

Here’s a look at a lesson:

The course covers everything from setting up your first Shopify store (including perfecting the settings) to sourcing products from China, dropshipping using Aliexpress, building your brand, Facebook ads, email marketing, and much more.

Here are all the modules:

Shopify

Sourcing Products

Facebook

Email Marketing

Building Your A-Team

Project Management

Long-term Exit Plan

Bonus Section

In addition to learning nearly everything you need to know to build a six- or seven-figure ecommerce business, you get a discounted Shopify plan with an extended free trial, discounts on recommended Shopify apps, and a weekly live webinar called “Profit Power Hour” where Adrian teaches you even more and shows you more real-life examples of the things he teaches in the course.

This course is perfect for anyone whowants a complete Shopify training from start to finish in a single course.

Justin teaches media buying frameworks that work across all the big ad networks like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. He also teaches the “right size” funnel he used to scale ad campaigns for his own ecommerce clients, so you can set up a profitable paid advertising funnel for your products.

Media Buying Masters has four modules:

Fundamentals

Media Planning

Media Buying

Campaign Optimization

Justin’s videos teach both the fundamentals and advanced frameworks you need to make paid ads work for your ecommerce business. He also has a private Slack community, where you can hire expert media buyers who practice his methods and chat with other business owners who spend millions on ads per month.

This course is great for anyone whohas a proven offer and wants to scale their store to the next level with paid ads.

The next course on our list was co-founded by Sumo’s Copy Chief, Chris Von Wilpert. I’ve taken and loved this course — it’s a true gem compared to many of the generic content marketing courses on the market.

Why this course? Because Chris used his content marketing skills to double Sumo’s blog traffic in his first month after he was hired by Noah Kagan.

Content Marketing Masters has examples of successful Shopify stores driving traffic to their store with content marketing, but isn’t limited to ecommerce.

Here’s a sneak peek at the dashboard:

Content Marketing Masters has three modules:

White Belt (people with a new site, no list, $10/day budget)

Blue Belt (people with a site, small list, small brand, $100/day budget)

Black Belt (people with an established site, a decent sized list, $10k/mo budget)

Chris’s videos are all screen shares of exactly how he does each step. There is a Slack community, where you can ask Chris and his team questions directly (he helped me define my content marketing strategy for The Wandering RV!).

This course is great for anyone who wants to learn free and paid traffic tactics to grow their brand and revenue through content marketing.

I can’t recommend SEO That Works highly enough. This course changed my business life. I used the skills learned in this course to build The Wandering RV from a few hundred organic search visits per month to over 4,000 per day.

Likewise, my income has risen. In July 2018, I sent nearly $70,000 in sales to Amazon in a single month.

The instructor, Brian Dean, is a world-renowned SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko, a blog all about SEO and link building.[*]

Here’s a look at a module:

Each module has four easy-to-follow videos; a bonus module has 12 videos, which include copywriting, social media marketing, email list building, hiring, and more. Most of the bonus module videos are interviews with industry experts like Brian Harris of Videofruit.

Each module has worksheets, extra help videos, and guides you can print and fill out as you work along. Beyond the modules, Brian gives you access to “Insider Sessions” — audio files that answer common questions.

Enrollment is open two times a year, and everyone takes the class together. Brian then releases one module per week after you sign up, so you won’t get overwhelmed or fall behind. And you get access to a very active Facebook group as well!

All in all, I recommend this course for anyone with a proven product who wants to focus on SEO and long-term ROI.

Want My Complete List of Shopify Training Courses?

The seven courses in this article are some of the best Shopify training courses in the world. But maybe none of them spoke to you.

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